Lechbinska Long read
Natural Subjects
A text by media theorist Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski
The task of science is to explain and make comprehensible that which we do not (yet) understand. The cardinal misunderstanding of European modernity is that it stubbornly assumes that man's rationalised thinking can subjugate the earth. The noblest task of the arts, on the other hand, is to make us sensitive to the other, including the other of nature. This presupposes that the natural world that we inhabit and whose hospitality we enjoy does not rank below us earthlings, but is active on an equal level with us. We respect it and the infinite variations of its existence as subjects - and not as objects to be dominated and exploited.
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Bignia Wehrli also experiments with natural phenomena as subjects in her works. Like a butterfly hunter, she has invented devices with which she can capture aspects of the sensational phenomena without destroying them - on the contrary. With these devices, the artist helps them to unfold their mysterious natural beauty in the artistic space. In the winter of 2025, for example, she captured snowflakes using the process of iron blue printing, cyanotopy, and had them draw their own unique shapes on the delicate plates. The result is an astonishing diversity of the active natural material that we normally generalise with a single word as snow. The title for the series of works "A Thousand Suns" (2022, 2023) plays with the infinite variations in which nature expresses itself. The artist has placed large-format silver gelatine paper in a black box (another photographic process alongside cyanotopia) and fitted 100 fine pinholes apertures into the lid of the box. The rotating movement of the box along with the Earth’s rotation over time, creates dynamic moving structures of fine dots on the light-sensitive paper, which visualise the positioning of the sun in relation to the recording instrument. Each dot represents a negative image of the squandering central star in our planetary system, a black sun. Four delicately drawn, coloured graphics comment on the photographic process as autonomous images of the solar collector. And Wehrli's third work also plays with the capture and transformation of light. Using simple pinhole cameras mounted on long steel rods (Lightcatcher instrument, 2021), she captures fleeting moments from the movement of light on a flat film and prints the captured glimpses of light on pigment paper. This is also how the "Moonliner" from 2021 was created, in which the movement of the moon forms a golden yellow ring.
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Siegfried Zielinski (Berlin, 29 March 2025)
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Bignia Wehrli also experiments with natural phenomena as subjects in her works. Like a butterfly hunter, she has invented devices with which she can capture aspects of the sensational phenomena without destroying them - on the contrary. With these devices, the artist helps them to unfold their mysterious natural beauty in the artistic space. In the winter of 2025, for example, she captured snowflakes using the process of iron blue printing, cyanotopy, and had them draw their own unique shapes on the delicate plates. The result is an astonishing diversity of the active natural material that we normally generalise with a single word as snow. The title for the series of works "A Thousand Suns" (2022, 2023) plays with the infinite variations in which nature expresses itself. The artist has placed large-format silver gelatine paper in a black box (another photographic process alongside cyanotopia) and fitted 100 fine pinholes apertures into the lid of the box. The rotating movement of the box along with the Earth’s rotation over time, creates dynamic moving structures of fine dots on the light-sensitive paper, which visualise the positioning of the sun in relation to the recording instrument. Each dot represents a negative image of the squandering central star in our planetary system, a black sun. Four delicately drawn, coloured graphics comment on the photographic process as autonomous images of the solar collector. And Wehrli's third work also plays with the capture and transformation of light. Using simple pinhole cameras mounted on long steel rods (Lightcatcher instrument, 2021), she captures fleeting moments from the movement of light on a flat film and prints the captured glimpses of light on pigment paper. This is also how the "Moonliner" from 2021 was created, in which the movement of the moon forms a golden yellow ring.
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Siegfried Zielinski (Berlin, 29 March 2025)